If you understood that then apologies for the obligatory joke. If you didn’t then I can safely assume that you’re not a regular at Slashdot where I came across this on the RSS feed at the start of the month.
ASCII renditions of things just keep on impressing me. It started at university with FIGlet generators, returned last year while watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup and then once more a good few weeks ago standing 10 meters away from the computer monitor to watch a VideoLAN real-time transcoded version of a HD stream from a colleagues home media server.
Now it’s possible to do this while walking around using these ASCII goggles to present you with a view of the World in a Matrix/Terminator style. Actually ASCII is only one of the possible filters available. Cool but not without use for a change I’d say - surely these things could quite easily be modified to assist people with any number of eye defects.
I’m not talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (easy for me to say) but the brilliant just-out-of-beta text editor that my colleague introduced me to last week. It basically brings the power of TextMate to Windows. I’ve tried to switch from TextPad several times before but I’ve always been shackled by just how used to the keystrokes and shortcuts I’ve gotten over the years. True enough, you can alter the keystroke bindings in a lot of editors but one thing kept me returning to TextPad time and again: the context-sensitive transpose call invoked with Control-T.
I’m glad to report that it wasn’t just me being weird. The developers of e obviously value this functionality as highly as me. Actually, scratch that. Higher than me as they’ve extended how this tool works to embrace multiple sections and a column mode.
It’s not quite perfect just yet. Line bookmarks and a split-screen edit mode are missing. A more powerful search and replace is also conspicuous by its absence. One final downside is that after a lot of excited discussion of new features with my colleagues it will probably be expected that I’m at least 15% more efficient!
I’ve recently switched my day-to-day browser of choice from being Firefox (herein taken to be version 2) to Safari. Okay, so being the geek I am, I actually use a nightly build of WebKit (Safari) and Bon Echo (OS X Intel compiled Firefox) but I’ll use the names that everybody knows.
A couple of things annoy me in Safari however. I can’t start up with the windows and tabs from my previous session. Control+Enter still top-and-tails what I type into the location bar with http://www. and .com but does so in another tab. I guess I’ll get used to it. Also while I’m actually building sites I’ll still be using Firefox mainly due to the fantastically useful array of developer tools available.
Continue reading ‘Safari, so good’
I know a lot of things on the Internet are pretty pointless. Entertaining maybe, but ultimately pointless. Here are two things on Facebook that are pointless and utterly devoid of any entertainment value whatsoever.
Firstly is the handy information that “You are online now” when viewing your own profile. Really? Gee thanks for, like, lettting me know.
Next up is something I didn’t know before this weekend. You can actually “poke” yourself — if that’s your kind of thing. After searching on your own name, you get this option appearing in the results. It doesn’t even appear in your mini-feed so nobody will find out your secret hobby.
Over lunch today I saw one of my colleagues reading the daily sports section of one of the office newspapers. The masthead of the section reads “Monday Sport”, “Tuesday Sport” and so on through the days - apart from Wednesday when it is titled “Midweek Sport”. I was deeply puzzled by this illogical sequence until one of the designers pointed out that there just wasn’t enough room to fit in the word “Wednesday” without some kind of reworking of the layout.
Oversight, laziness or is it just me?
I rushed home straight after work this evening to keep up with proceedings from the Apple media event. Okay, I’m the first to admit that I’m somewhat of a magpie and easily attracted to shiny things. Especially so when the shiny thing in question is designed by Apple – much to the amusement and bewilderment of most of my friends!
For the most part, Apple just seem to understand how their customers want things to behave and look. Observe the reaction to the Intel sticker question. Of course the $200 price-drop for the 8 gig iPhone which was also announced today isn’t going down too well with people who have purchased one in the past couple of months. One of the dangers of being an early adopter.
A lot of people (Ed Colligan for example) are having to eat some humble pie with the success of the iPhone. It was the biggest selling smartphone in the USA for the month of July.
Some people remain unconvinced. NBC have abandoned the iTunes Music Store in favour of the much more DRM restrictive Unbox from Amazon. Universal already receive money from each Zune music player sold as compensation based on the assumption that it will be used for playing illegally obtained music. Way to your treat your customers Microsoft. Maybe this is one reason that they’ve only just recently sold one million units. Or maybe because they’re brown. Maybe because they use the terminology “squirting”. Who knows.
I’m now wondering whether to cave in and get the iPod touch or wait it out for the European iPhone launch. The fact that the joystick-type-thing on my K800i is starting to misbehave may just swing it to the latter.
No, that’s not my new chimpanzee impression but the sounds uttered last night by the 250,000 people who watched the annual Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert that marks the end of the month-long Edinburgh Festival.
I’ve watched the show from various vantage points over the past few years: South of the castle on Bruntsfield Links, Queen Street and had a great view last night on Princes Street, at the junction with Castle Street.
Around four tonnes of fireworks were let off over a period of 45 minutes and five pieces of classical music that was annoyingly barely audible. Maybe I’ll try and get tickets for the band stand next year.
The most impressive view however was last year when I was flying back from a friends wedding. The flight was delayed enough for the Fireworks to be going off just as we were circling Edinburgh on approach to the airport. Of course I couldn’t hear the music from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra but the unique view more than compensated for this!